Pixel Scroll 6/30/17 There’s A Million Ways To Scroll, Ev’ry One’s A Pixel

It turns out the idea of living dead—depending how you define both “living” and “dead”—may not be as far-fetched as it might seem. Some science fiction writers have found inspiration—and trepidation—in real-life parasites. We talked to two of them, Mira Grant and M.R. Carey, about their newest books and the concept of scientific zombies.

…Carey searched for a pathogen that met his criteria for the cause of the hungry epidemic, and realized that Cordyceps fit perfectly. It was also a unique choice. “At the time nobody had ever used a fungus as the vector for a zombie plague,” he says, though the creators of a console game called The Last of Us came up with the same idea independently, around the same time.

… Besides reading, Grant also “spent a lot of time on the phone with the CDC, which was an incredible amount of fun.” Grant savored the information she gleaned that way, but her friends “had to make new rules about what I was allowed to discuss over food,” so they didn’t lose their appetites.

Though still working on the translation, Fitt and his publisher released the opening paragraph, which reads: “Mr and Mrs Dursley, o nummer fower, Privet Loan, were prood tae say that they were gey normal, thank ye awfie muckle. They were the lest fowk ye wid jalouse wid be taigled up wi onythin unco or ferlie, because they jist widnae hae onythin tae dae wi joukery packery like yon.”

In his first adventure, Harry leaves the cruel Dursley family to attend Hogwarts wizarding school, which has long been understood to be based somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, where Scots speakers exist in their highest numbers.

Something has to change. Our elections are being targeted by Russia, our shipping system was hijacked this week and congress continues to try to spy on you with your smartphone. It doesn’t have to be this way. I have a plan

Just 15 people in the US House determine our nation’s tech policy on the Science and Technology Subcommittee.

Meaning just 8 votes control our policy on privacy, encryption, and net neutrality. The giant telecoms have a voice. Shouldn’t you?

Please contribute, so we can get Brianna Wu elected to US Congress in 2018, representing Massachusetts District 8! Help fight for a braver, bolder Democratic party!

Isaac Asimov science fiction trilogy Foundation heavily informed Star Wars and many other sci-fi films and TV series, but for decades it has confounded Hollywood attempts at a straight adaptation. I’m hearing that Skydance, David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman are going to try to crack it. Skydance Television is closing a deal with the Asimov estate to try turning Foundation into a sprawling TV series.

… The biggest creative quandary, I’ve heard from those who tried to adapt Foundation, is that so many of Asimov’s themes found their way into George Lucas’s Star Wars that the challenge is to not appear to be ripping off one of Hollywood’s most successful film franchises, even though Asimov wrote his books 75 years ago. Considering that Lucasfilm continues to borrow from that mythology with myriad Star Wars sequels and spinoff films, perhaps a TV series is the best bet.

Compelling Science Fiction is now one of the few magazines worldwide that is considered a professional “Qualifying Market” by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America: Short fiction Qualifying Markets

SFWA is a wonderful organization that supports authors in a huge number of ways (our own publishing contract is adapted from SFWA’s model magazine contract). SFWA also hosts the annual Nebula Awards. While we have always paid professional rates, this recognition means that our published authors will find it much easier to use their publication in our magazine to meet SFWA membership requirements, because we have already been vetted.

The twelve prozines of June produced thirty-eight stories and I read thirty-five of them at about 165K words. (Tor.com should have posted a fourth story on the 28th but didn’t. If it comes out today or tomorrow, I’ll update this post accordingly.) The random flukes of this month were a large number of honorable mentions (with not so many recommendations) which were mostly SF, half of which came from almost the entire issue of Compelling Science Fiction. Given that, I’ll basically do a mini-review of the whole issue after the lists.

About 66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer-wide hunk of rock smashed into Earth near what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

The impact created a global dust cloud that snuffed out the sunlight, leading to the demise of 80 percent of Earth’s plants and animals—including most of the dinosaurs. A 200-kilometer-wide crater buried near the city of Chicxulub is all that’s left. It’s ground zero for one of the world’s most notable extinction events.

But throughout Earth’s history, there have actually been five major extinction events. The largest of these occurred about 250 million years ago, when a whopping 96 percent of life on Earth died. Scientists aren’t sure what caused the event, known as “the Great Dying.” If it was a Chicxulub-sized impact; no one has ever found the crater.

Until possibly now.

A trio of scientists—one of whom is funded by The Planetary Society—thinks they may have found it. Off the coast of South America, near the Falkland Islands, there appears to be a 250-kilometer-wide crater buried under ocean sediment. An upcoming paper in the August edition of the peer-reviewed journal Terra Nova suggests it was formed by a massive asteroid or comet bigger than the one that hit Chicxulub.

(8) TODAY’S DAY

Asteroid Day

A global awareness event where people from around the world come together to learn about what we can do to protect Earth from an asteroid impact. Did you know that, as you’re reading this, there are likely one million near-Earth asteroids large enough to do severe damage if they hit Earth? We don’t have to go the way of the dinosaurs. Learn more about what we can do to reduce the threat:

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

June 30, 1971 – Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was released.

June 30, 1972 — The fourth film in the series — Conquest of the Planet of the Apes — premiered theatrically.

(11) DISNEYLAND. When the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland is updated the bride auction scene will be going away. However, the iconic redhead will still be around – as a pirate helping to rob the townspeople. According to the Orange County Register:

The pirates will no longer be saying “We wants the Redhead” in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland after the auction scene undergoes a modification in 2018.

The Walt Disney Company plans to make changes to the auction scene in the classic attraction at Disneyland, Walt Disney World and Disneyland Paris in the coming year, according to Suzi Brown, spokeswoman for the Disneyland Resort.

While the scene has long been a favorite of many Disney fans, it has occasionally been the brunt of criticism for what some believed to be a “sexist” approach to women. Years ago, the scene that comes after the auction scene, which used to have pirates chasing women, was changed to pirates chasing women for food, and one where a woman was chasing a pirate.

When asked about the sexism Brown said, in a statement, “We believe the time is right to turn the page to a new story in this scene, consistent with the humorous, adventurous spirit of the attraction.”

In the auction scene, the Redhead will become a pirate, helping the Auctioneer gather valuables from the townspeople to auction off to the pirates.

The first version of the attraction to receive the new scene will be at Disneyland Paris next month, with the two domestic parks receiving it within the next year or so.

There was nothing amusing or cute about what real-life pirates did when they sacked a town, so in the midst of a musical horror fantasy about such an event it’s interesting where they think they need to redraw the line in 2017 to keep people from being reminded of that.

When the Fort Shelby became a Doubletree Hotel in 2008 on the first ten floors, the developers used tax credits to turn the 56 units above into apartments. Now that the time has passed for the credits, the apartments can be turned into condos, and a few of them have already listed.

They start at $280,000 for a one-bedroom and go up to $570,000 for a three-bedroom on a higher level. Six penthouses will also be available on the 21st floor, and those will run from $350,000 to $815,000.

According to the Loft Warehouse, the listing firm, four are ready now and another 19 are in the pipeline for the year as apartment leases run out.

A California house designed to resemble a home from the Flintstones cartoon sold for nearly $3 million after multiple price drops.

Judy Meuschke of Alain Pinel Realtors said the unique property sold for $2.8 million in May after arriving on the market for a price of $4.2 million in 2015.

The property features a rounded, stone-like exterior with grey and orange walls, closely resembling the cavelike homes in the Flinstones’ home of Bedrock City.

(14) ONE MILLION BC. More information about the forthcoming Marvel Legacy.

It all starts with MARVEL LEGACY #1.

Journey to the dawn of time, as Marvel introduces you to the first Avengers from 1,000,000 BC – when iconic torch-bearers such as Odin, Iron Fist, Starbrand, Ghost Rider, Phoenix, Agamotto, and Black Panther come together for the startling origin of the Marvel Universe, in MARVEL LEGACY #1 on sale this September in comic shops everywhere!

“MARVEL LEGACY #1 isn’t simply a history lesson,” says SVP and Executive Editor Tom Brevoort. “Rather, it’s the starting gun to a bevy of mysteries, secrets, and revelations that will reverberate across the Marvel Universe in the weeks and months to come! No character, no franchise will be untouched by the game-changing events that play out across its pages. Jason and Esad pulled out all the stops to fat-pack this colossal issue with as much intrigue, action, surprise, mystery, shock, and adventure as possible!”

Golden Compass author Philip Pullman surprised millions of fans late last year when he announced that he would be returning to the world of the immensely popular His Dark Materials trilogy.

His three new books — the first set 10 years before the original trilogy and the next two coming after the events in those books — will once again transport readers to Lyra’s Oxford. The first volume in the companion Book of Dust trilogy is La Belle Sauvage (for which you can exclusively see the cover below), which centers on Malcolm Polstead and is in fact named for his canoe, which will become a central part of the story. But fans needn’t worry, as not only will Lord Asriel (and his daemon Stelmaria) definitely make an appearance in the book along with baby Lyra Belacqua (the main protagonist of the best-selling books), but careful readers of the previous books may remember that Malcolm himself had had a brief appearance in them….

This new trilogy has an interesting timeline. What inspired you to make the first book in this companion trilogy more of a prequel to the original trilogy, as opposed to a sequel like the two proceeding books?

The story I found myself telling had a beginning that closely involved Lyra, but it happened when she was about six months old. Then came an interval, during which some of the consequences of the first part were worked out in the story of His Dark Materials, when she was about 11 or 12. But other things were still lying in the ground, waiting to germinate. About 10 years after the events in His Dark Materials, the first shoots of those other things begin to emerge from the ground. But because they’re not really a consequence of His Dark Materials, I don’t want to call them a sequel; and because I don’t like the word “prequel,” I didn’t want to call the first book by that word. So I call The Book of Dust an “equel.”

If you thought Fox was slowing down on movies based on Marvel Comics properties, the 2018 slate, featuring New Mutants on April 13, 2018, Deadpool 2 on June 1, 2018, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix on November 2, 2018, probably put that thought to bed. If even that plan didn’t show you their dedication to the franchise, well, this should: 20th Century Fox has reserved release dates for 2019, 2020, and spring 2021 marking six Marvel movie releases in just 21 months.

New Fox/Marvel movies will hit theaters on June 7, 2019, November 22, 2019, March 13, 2020, June 26 2020, October 2, 2020, and March 5, 2021. The production house has not indicated at all whether those will be X-Men or Fantastic Four films, the two properties they currently own film rights to from Marvel Entertainment. This is a common practice in the blockbuster release category nowadays;

There’s a new type of airship called the Cloud, and it has a silver lining. (It’s also a giant, floating communications hub.) Finn Aberdein goes to watch a nerve-wracking flight with its maker KuangChi Science.

They decided right away that a full cosplay wedding, right down to the dress, would suit them best. By that point, Megan had accumulated a following in the cosplay community (she has more than 45,000 followers on Instagram) and founded the local group DC CosGeeks. She also didn’t want a repeat of her first wedding, which was much more conventional.

(19) LIFE CYCLES. Artis Lives on Vimeo is a fun cartoon promoting the Amsterdam Royal Zoo.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Jason, JJ, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Daniel Dern, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

70 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/30/17 There’s A Million Ways To Scroll, Ev’ry One’s A Pixel”

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Re 1): ‘It was also a unique choice. “At the time nobody had ever used a fungus as the vector for a zombie plague,” he says, though the creators of a console game called The Last of Us came up with the same idea independently, around the same time.’

Hmmm, I’m not certain it was that unique – I can think of a couple of examples that predate both, just off the top of my head. E.g. Spore by John Skipp (“godfather of splatterpunk”) and Cody Goodfellow. (First published in 2010, by Leisure)
Admittedly, you’d have to be fairly big on horror to know about it.

Cassy B on July 1, 2017 at 2:33 pm said:
Rob_matic, I think the point of Every Heart a Doorway is that every single one of the kids at that home were, and are, misfits. (I’m going to try to carefully talk in generalities to try to avoid spoilers.) They didn’t, and couldn’t, fit in at home, and so they found their doors. In our culture, at this time, who is it that most doesn’t fit in? Who would be looking for escape? Honestly, it’s the people you designate as “diversity-flavoured political tropes”. The ones who get bullied or punished for their differences from the norm. The square pegs that their family and school and society tries to sand down to fit into the round holes.

It really seems to me a little like complaining that a story set in a hospital is full of sick people. Or that story set on a submarine in WWII only has young, physically fit male characters. The popular, “ordinary kids, the captain of the football team and the head cheerleader, don’t need doors. These kids do.

That they are all misfits is a fair point, and I accept that. There don’t seem to be any class or cultural differences though, amongst these people who don’t fit in the most.

I’m not saying that they aren’t valid issues to explore, but that to me it feels clumsily done.

I ended Every Heart a Doorway pretty angry, because I thought it was such a great idea and so poorly executed that every piece of the structure was visible and creaking. Plus, with two exceptions, I kept mixing up the characters, because I find high-concept/low-differentiation characters insufficiently dissimilar to keep track of. I didn’t code it as diversity flavoring, but did feel like the differences between characters were mostly superficial.

@ rob_matic: Cassy said what I was thinking in significantly more detail. But also, I’m being reminded of a conversation I had over the weekend with someone who was complaining that “Disney has gone all political now”, and having to point out to him that if you don’t see something as being political, that means that its politics align closely enough with your own that you don’t notice.

As to your argument about “no class and cultural differences”, remember that the setting is a pricey private school. This is going to put some automatic limits on the backgrounds of the people in it, just as happens in the real ones.

Also, pricey private schools, either boarding or day, nearly always offer scholarships. Depending on their endowment and their mission, a private school might offer reduced fees to as many as 80% of their students. McGuire had a very specially constructed school, but its real world analogues operate a little more democratically and many of them work hard to diversify their communities along all lines, including economically.

As for class differences, only kids with parents wealthy enough to afford a boarding school would be represented.

Did they ever say whether or not parents were charged for their children attending the school? One conceit of some stories involving boarding schools is that the school is run by a wealthy benefactor who doesn’t charge for attendance.

So with the discussion of Every Heart a Doorway coming back, has anyone else read the partial prequel, Down Among the Sticks and Bones? I just finished it and am very torn; it’s a powerful story, but there’s much more telling than showing, including a lot of “this is the way Story goes” lines. It’s possible that showing would have taken a much larger book (a very fast count suggests it’s 30-35K words), or even technique McGuire doesn’t have yet (based on my having read most of what’s she’s written), or maybe she’s deliberately writing something that might be called interpreted fiction?

@steve davidson: the idea of a fannish caucus is amusing, but I figure Wu has zero chance; she’s running in a conservative (by MA standards) district, against an incumbent who fits the district and hasn’t massively screwed up like the last incumbent to be displaced. She’d have much more likelihood of making a difference if she got experience in a smaller office — or otherwise made a continuing name for herself among some part of the non-gaming majority — and used that for leverage when the incumbent either screws up or retires. I suppose it’s possible to leverage social media to pull in people who mostly don’t vote — but so far I haven’t seen impressive results from that tactic.

The discussion of a fannish caucus reminded me of this spoof review by Keith Lynch of a non-existent anthology (published in an old issue of WSFA Journal http://www.wsfa.org/journal/j97/4/#Al ) which includes a story that ends with “The Republicans and Democrats all resign in disgrace, and are replaced by a government of fans. Ten years later, the world is united, and the world president is selected every three years at the Worldcon, based on his or her responses to various hypothetical scenarios which are written by Hugo-winning SF authors.”

I figure Wu has zero chance; she’s running in a conservative (by MA standards) district, against an incumbent who fits the district and hasn’t massively screwed up like the last incumbent to be displaced.

…and is a local boy, to boot.

Out of curiosity, who do you mean by “the last incumbent to be displaced”?

Lynch was first elected to the 9th district and re-districted into the 8th, but the last person prior to that to lose an election as an incumbent in the 9th was Louise Day Hicks in 1972. In the 8th, an incumbent hadn’t lost re-election since 1954. But given redistricting, it might have been another district when someone was displaced.

She’d have much more likelihood of making a difference if she got experience in a smaller office — or otherwise made a continuing name for herself among some part of the non-gaming majority — and used that for leverage when the incumbent either screws up or retires.

Yeah, I expect she’ll be able to give some speeches and make some points, and maybe get Lynch to lean a little more in the direction she’d like, if she gets some reasonable amount of support, but the odds that she can actually beat him seem pretty low.

She’s young enough that starting out in state government could give her a foundation to build on, but a run straight at federal office with no experience, against an 8-term pro-labor local who came up from the state senate doesn’t seem realistic.

Did they ever say whether or not parents were charged for their children attending the school? One conceit of some stories involving boarding schools is that the school is run by a wealthy benefactor who doesn’t charge for attendance.

Yes, the whole concept of “Our schools helps you in time of need” weouldnt work if the parents would have to pay for it.

I dont see the “heavy virtue signaling”. At all. I didnt even notice a specially “box ticking” in regards of the cast. The only thing I might count is the part about the sexuality of one character. I understood it as a nod to the real life problems these kids have, in addition to the portal thing.
If “compassion” is the virtue being signalled, then, OK, I guess youre right, but then any story about difficult children (Lemony Snickers, Home of perticular children, X-men) would be virtue signaling by default (and I dont think you meant that aspect).
If I disliked an aspect of EHAD its that the story is less than the worldbuildiong, meaning it was easy to figure out and was a bit on the short side. I found the same with Dusk to Day, but that was even more abrupt. But then again: These are novellas, not novels, so being short is somewhat the point.

@Kurt: I was speaking of Tierney’s loss to Moulton in the 6th-district primary, following ~money scandals. (I’m not enough of a political junkie to quote upsets in other states.) My unstated assumption was that, like Moulton, Wu would run in the Democratic primary, which I see on the front page of her website; running as an independent strikes me as even less likely to work given her platform.

Regarding messaging and McGuire… I’m in the middle of “Every Heart a Doorway.” Both this novella and Chambers’ ACaCO (and the previous novel in that series) feel kind of like Heinlein’s juveniles, but less clunky. Spunky (or not-so-spunky), intelligent, right-minded kids doing their best to be good citizens in a world full of people with their own agendas and selfish motives. Neither book has the “gosh-gee pop always told me there’d be folk who don’t feel they should have to work for their dinner, but I sure never thought I’d meet one homesteading up here on Mars” feel of Heinlein’s juveniles, but they do seem to be trying to educate as well as entertain.

(13) I kind of like the aesthetics of that house, but every picture of the interior I’ve seen gives the impression that it would be near-impossible to have any substantial bookshelves in there. To me, that would be a deal breaker.